CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION: RE-DISCOVERING YUTANG IN THE POST-MAO ERA

Lin Yutang (1895–1976) was a most significant, yet now almost for- gotten, cosmopolitan intellectual whose literary and cultural practices had traveled across China and America in the twentieth century. After Lin’s The Importance of Living topped the US national bestseller list for the year of 1938, Lin established himself as the authoritative modern Chinese intellectual for the American public for much of the 20th century. Due to his liberal and anti-communist stance, Lin’s name was banned in Mao’s China for several decades, but post-Mao China has seen a revival of interest in Lin Yutang’s works. This book is not a biographical study of Lin Yutang’s life and works.1 Rather, it is a cross-cultural critique on the problematic of the liberal cosmopolitan in modern Chinese intellectuality in light of Lin Yutang’s literary and cultural practices across China and America, situated in the context of Chinese modernity and examined in comparative ref- erence to other discourses of major literary and intellectual figures in modern China, particularly those of Zhang Zhidong , , Gu Hongming , Hu Shi , , , Pearl S. Buck , Agnes Smedley and . While relevant to contemporary Western critical concerns over cosmopolitanism, my study re-orients the issue in the context of Chinese modernity in terms of Chinese intellectual interaction with the world. In the September 13, 1930 issue of The China Critic, an English- language weekly published in China, there appeared a “Proposal for a Liberal Cosmopolitan Club in ,” in which a group of West- ern-educated Chinese intellectuals called for Chinese and foreigners to form “a club of men who are citizens of the world who can think,

1 A full biographical study of Lin Yutang’s life and works is my next project. For current biographical work on Lin Yutang, see Lin Taiyi, Lin Yutang zhuan (Biography of Lin Yutang); and Diran John Sohigian, “The Life and Times of Lin Yutang,” both offering useful biographical information about Lin Yutang but falling short of giving a complete and balanced picture. 2 chapter one or are willing to make an effort to think, over and above the merely nationalistic lines.”2 At a talk given at the Liberal Cosmopolitan Club in March, 1931, entitled “What Liberalism Means ,” Lin Yutang identified liberalism as essentially an attitude of mind that embraces cosmopolitanism, that is, one-world-ness brought about by modern technological innovations such as the radio, the plane, the automobile and the television. Even though liberalism is “offensive, degrading and unpatriotic,” since race prejudices are much more popular, natural and patriotic, Lin contends, it is urgent for us to develop a modern intellectual attitude that corresponds to the modern world we live in where “foreign devils” are right next door.3 Lin Yutang’s own literary practices across China and America in much of the twentieth-century can be seen as exemplifying and prob- lematizing such an intellectual disposition. Born to a Chinese Chris- tian family in a mountain village in province, Lin Yutang went to St. John’s College, an Episcopalian missionary school in Shanghai, earned his MA in Comparative Literature at , and obtained his doctoral degree in Philology from Leipzig University, Germany, in 1923. Lin’s first publication was in English, and in 1930, he started the “Little Critic” column in The China Critic. He was first well-known in Chinese literary world as a leader of the Lunyu (Ana- lects) literary school in the 1930s, responsible for launching a series of very popular literary periodicals. Hailed as “Master of Humor,” Lin was seen in China as an exemplary Westernized modern Chinese intellectual introducing such Western cultural dispositions as “humor” into Chinese culture. After he came to the US in 1936, however, Lin was most widely known as a “Chinese philosopher ” interpreting Chi- nese cultural wisdom to the American public at large. With a series of bestsellers in English such as My Country and My People , The Impor- tance of Living, The Wisdom of China and India, Lin became an influential public figure in America outspoken on cultural and political issues related to China and Asia in the 1930s and 1940s. Self-fashioned as a kind of world citizen, Lin established himself as an internationally renowned writer/intellectual in the 20th century world of letters. His bilingual writings and cross-cultural practices have left a formidable

2 “Proposal for a Liberal Cosmopolitan Club in Shanghai,” The China Critic, (Sep- tember 13, 1930): 1085. 3 Lin Yutang, “What Liberalism Means,” The China Critic, (March 12, 1931): 251–253.